Faith, Movements, and

Ideology Critique

Justin Lasser and Leonard Williams

Introduction

Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Simon Critchley have all turned to the Apostle Paul as a means

of imagining revolutionary ethical subjects and communities. None of these thinkers are

interested in Paul’s theology per se; rather, they explore how Paul can operate as an example of

how a subject recalibrates the contours of society’s ideological matrix. The Pauline turn in leftist

theory claims that faith need not be in reference to some transcendent God or master figure. In

fact, the question of God’s existence is for the most part irrelevant for these theorists. Instead, this

faith is in response to a call to be ethical and responsible for all people. This is not a “personal

responsibility” of the libertarian stipe, but a responsibility to every person, even a responsibility

demanded of every person.1

For our purposes, it little matters whether one views this call to be an agent in the service

of everyone as an “infinite demand” (following Critchley) or as faithfulness to a “Truth-Event”

(following Badiou). Each of these theorists see the Apostle Paul as a model for how to take up

such a call. It is in this sense that Paul’s faith was a response, not the result of intellectual

conversion. Rather than contemplating the intellectual history of Judaism and discovering that

Jesus was the Messiah because of a series of prophecies, say, Paul experiences Jesus as the “risen

Christ” and suddenly everything in the world is different. According to Paul’s letters, this aspect

change is the result of either an apparition of Jesus,2 or in chapter nine of the Acts of the

Apostles) a voice asking: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” The question Critchley and

Badiou seem to be asking, then, is what is the relevance of faith, as commonly understood?

In an interview with stirtoaction.com, Critchley comments on the irrelevancy of faith in a

transcendent God for political action, writing that

if we have a strange situation where there are people, like myself for example, who are faithless but have an experience of faith in relationship to an infinite demand, say, the prohibition of murder or the furthering of equality. Then there are people where that faith is underwritten by some theistic reality in their worldview. My view is that it makes no difference at the subjective level: the belief in God is neither here nor there.

1 Following the great Hebrew prophetic tradition, each person may not be at fault for society’s ills, but each

person is responsible for correcting them. See also Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of

Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007). 2 1 Corinthians 15:1-11: Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you,

which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to

the message that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain. For I handed on to you as of first

importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he

was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to

Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of

whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to

one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because

I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in

vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe. (NRSV translation).

It is a useless distraction. It does not matter what you believe but rather how you act.3

Žižek radicalizes Badiou and Critchley’s claim of the irrelevancy of God’s existence by proposing

that one of Paul’s great contributions to the critique of ideology was the proclamation of the

gospel of “the death of God.” But, for Žižek, this nonexistent God is still Real.4 This God, despite

being always-already dead, still persists and insists on us individuals. This persistence manifests

itself in an insistence, that is, in the call for egalitarian justice which haunts the world with

“infinite demands.” For Žižek, Badiou, and Critchley, then, the Apostle Paul was an “activist”

focused on setting up intentional “collectives of believers” in a manner that challenged the

hegemonic ideas and practices of the Roman Empire. They consider this “spirit” of collective

believers to be an example of how the Left should critique contemporary ideologies and how to

set up alternative autonomous and egalitarian communities. Consider how Žižek describes the

modern relevancy of such a “spirit community”:

The ideal is that of neither blind liberal individuals collaborating with one another nor the

old organic conservative community. It is a community along the lines of the original

Christian community: a community of outcasts. We need this today, this idea of an

egalitarian community of believers that is neither the traditional heretical community nor

the liberal multiplicity. This is why I and many other leftist philosophers, such as Alain

Badiou and others, are so interested in rereading, rehabilitating, and reappropriating the

legacy of Paul … I claim that if we lose this key moment—the moment of realizing the

Holy Spirit as a community of believers—we will live in a very sad society, where the

only choice will be between vulgar egoist liberalism or the fundamentalism that

counterattacks it.5

While it is doubtful that this was actually the mission of the historical Apostle Paul, we believe

that the idea of building autonomous, intentional communities in the interstices of a hegemonic

social, political, and cultural order is both compelling and possible.

However, we wish to challenge the appropriateness of theorists using the historical Paul

as the reference point for imagining these communities. We propose that a better source of

inspiration would be found in the “Reign of God movements” of the first century Galilee,

movements that became associated with the historical Jesus of Nazareth. They are a much better

example of the political subject’s revolutionary behavior—both in form and in content. The

Pauline turn, by contrast, uses Paul as a formal model for the ethical and political subject, but

never provides a program for such subjects to follow or enact. The “Reign of God” movements in

Galilee actually exhibit a program for action that remains anti-hegemonic, ideologically critical,

and open to radical democratic forms of affinity. Their ideas and practices both reflect the

democratic and socialist dream of egalitarianism and resonate with autonomist and anarchist

tendencies in today’s radical politics.

This paper will begin by reviewing Badiou, Žižek, and Critchley’s appropriation of the

Apostle Paul and offer a critique of this approach. We will then outline an alternative approach

3Simon Critchley, interview by Jonny Gordon-Farleigh, 2012, STIR, http://stirtoaction.com/simon-critchley-interview/ 4 “Real” in the Lacanian sense of something that is-not, yet is still relevant. In other words, God has all positive

attributes. (omnipotence, transcendence, etc.) except one: existence. Such an entity in Lacanian theory is not merely

symbolic or imaginary, it is Real. 5 Slavoj Žižek, "A Meditation on Michelangelo’s Christ on the Cross," in Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the

Future of Christian Theology, ed. John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, and Creston Davis (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2010), 180-

181.

that builds on the ideas and experiences of the “Reign of God” movements (also known as the

“Jesus movement”) that were active in early first-century Galilee. Interestingly, the nature of

these movements has significant resonances with autonomist and anarchist tendencies. We will

trace these similarities and then draw important lessons for ideology critique and political

practice—whether for people of faith and for those whom Critchley calls “the faithless.”

Appropriations of Paul

Alain Badiou’s Paul

Badiou interprets Paul not as a philosopher or theologian, but as a subject who is responsive or

faithful to an event, particularly the sort of “event” that he describes in Being and Event.6

Badiou’s Paul is an “anti-philosopher” who rejects proof, deduction, and philosophical

systemization. Paul acts; he does not deliberate. He is also a “militant” operating against the

Roman imperial system, in the manner in which Badiou hopes that militants will operate against

the global capitalist system. Badiou’s Paul does not blindly deny the existence and persistence of

Law; rather, he simply acts as if the Law is irrelevant. The Law is present, but it only controls us

if we let it. One does not deny societal Law, one simply moves on as if it was irrelevant. By

acting in this way, we lose a belief in the efficacy of the Law, which allows it to crumble. This

opens the door to a new society, a new form of collective, and a new revolution.

Badiou claims that Paul’s commitment to the absolute one-ness of God challenges Law’s

division of society. Because the Law creates difference, Paul rejects it. God is one, and it is the

one God that is God—so, all must be committed to this One Truth.7 “The general apparatus of a

truth contains the One (divine transcendence, monotheism, according to Pauline fable), the

universal (the whole of humanity, both circumcised and uncircumcised), and the singular (the

Christ-event). The particular, which pertains to opinion, custom, law, cannot be inscribed in it.”8

What Badiou ignores, however, is that Paul’s “one God” is the national God of Israel. While Paul

believed this was the God of the whole world, this God was still “national”—a predicate made

evident in God’s directed genocide of the Canaanites in the Book of Joshua, for example.

Badiou appreciates Paul’s commitment to universal truth so intensely that he is able to

assume that belief in God’s existence as a metaphysical entity was irrelevant for Paul. For

Badiou’s Paul, the declaration that there is but a single God must be understood not as an

ontological claim concerning substance or a supreme being, but as a claim concerning a structure

of address, “The One is that which inscribes no difference in the subjects to which it addresses

itself. The One is only insofar as it is for all: such is the maxim of universality when it has its root

in the event.”9 However, it is very unlikely that Paul did not think that God existed as a

metaphysical entity. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine Paul undertaking his mission without some

form of guarantee in the form of an actually existing God. We find no evidence from which to

assume that Paul did not believe in God, but merely thought of God as the “basis of a structure of

address.” A structure of address deals only with form, and leaves content aside. In other words,

“what” the One is that is addressed is unimportant for Badiou; but the fact that we all address the

same One is important. God in this sense is not universal in content (the existence of a particular

God), but in the fact that this God (as an empty signifier) is being addressed by a series of 6 Alain Badiou, Being and Event (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 7 Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003),

76. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid.

subjects.

For Badiou, Paul’s Gospel “demonstrates in detail how a universal thought, proceeding on

the basis of the worldly proliferation of alterities (the Jew, the Greek, women, men, slaves, free

men, and so on) produces a Sameness and an Equality (there is no longer either Jew, or Greek,

and so on).”10 This is what makes Paul an antiphilosopher of the universal: universal in that his

thought is for all (rather than for a particular group), and anti-philosophical in that the event is not

the result of deductive or conceptual thinking. For Badiou, Paul’s engagement with the

resurrection of Christ opened a new era in humanity’s relationship to Law. Whereas Law requires

obedience and contractual agreement, grace operates freely without anything being owed.11 It has

been given to those who participate in the life of Christ, and grace, because it is unearned and

free, it is both universal and “communist.”12 Rather than a Law imposed from outside, we have an

invitation to join a self-adopted Rule or way of life, which Badiou’s Paul calls the “law of

spirit.”13 This law of spirit is one that binds initiates together in love, without coercion and by

their own initiative.

Badiou thus considers Paul as providing us with an example of what it is like to be a

subject of truth, to be faithful to an event, “Paul says to us: it is always possible for a

nonconformist thought to think in the century. That is what a subject is. It is he who maintains the

universal, not conformity.”14 But what sort of program does Paul support? Does not Badiou

merely valorize something that may not happen again? Paul’s action may be a model for a

response to event, but the event to which he responds, by Badiou’s own standard, is but a

semblance of an event, not an authentic truth-event. An authentic event is truly universal (in that

it derives from those who are presented in a situation but not re-presented, such as slaves in the

American South), whereas a semblance of an event appears universal, but actually is not (e.g.,

German National Socialism). Paul’s event is one that treats first century mythology as something

that must be believed and declared by everyone. Badiou calls this event a fiction, but he likely

does not mean that it is false or a lie. Rather, he means that it offers the possibility of a “final

belief in generic truths.”15

Slavoj Žižek’s Paul

Žižek’s writing on Paul stems from two primary interests. First, he aims to expose the virtual

nature of the symbolic domain (with its contingent and arbitrary laws, rules, regulations, and

social impositions), as well as in showing the subject a way to act through and beyond the

symbolic. The Lacanian psychoanalytic term for this symbolic domain is the “Big Other,” which

for Žižek is akin to the term “God.” Second, Žižek wants to move beyond the trappings of the law

of desire. In Lacanian tradition, the Law is what teaches us how to desire and what to desire. In

Freudo-Lacanian myth, we as children think that it is our self which is the object of desire (the

phallus) or that we possessed this object of desire, but both imaginary theories are wrong. We are

not the phallus, nor do we have “it;” we cannot have it, because (so the metaphor goes) Father has

it. We are told rather to go find our own (the little object of desire, objet petit a) or to have

someone bring “It” (the symbolic authority of the phallus) to us. Like the Real of God, this

phallus has every positive attribute except that of existence.

10 Ibid., 109. 11 Ibid., 76-77. 12 Ibid., 77. 13 Ibid., 87. 14 Ibid., 110-111. 15 Philosophy for Militants, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2012), 108.

The “drive” in Lacanian theory pursues not a particular object (objet petit a) but desires,

rather, the state of being-in-desire, which has no object except the “the Thing” which is Real, and

thereby does not exist. In other words, the drive is interested not in what is gained but in the

pursuit of what might be gained—what Lacan called “the beyond-of-the-signified.”16 The

promise of fulfillment is more desirable than what is desired. An enjoyment-in-meaning or pain

(what Lacan called jouissance) is too traumatic, so Law (which is the same thing as what is to be

desired) is imposed in order for the subject to know what to do with her or his life. Because

desire and Law never provide what they promise (the “It,” the phallus), they leave one forever

unfulfilled. What Law and desire fail to provide resurrects itself in the form of an obscene

injunction to desire beyond the law, to transgress their prohibitions regarding the “Thing” that

the drive pursues. For example, the socio-symbolic law which demands that men and women

refrain from adultery also encourages them to transgress it. Because there is a law, we are

curious about what is prohibited. We are curious about the pleasure, the jouissance of the

prohibited object, but the only reason we are interested in the prohibited object is because it is

prohibited.

Žižek connects this dynamic to Paul’s argument in Romans:

For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I

do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I

hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no

longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells

within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do

the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it

is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.17

While the Law was intended as a guide for Israel (much like the Law of the Father was to show

the child how to desire in an appropriate manner), it fails because it also teaches one about that

which is excessive and not-good. This is why Paul notes that he would not know what sin was

without the Law. So, in this sense, it is the Law against sin that shows us how to sin. From this

observation, Žižek confronts the quandary directly:

St. Paul’s problem is thus not the standard morbid moralistic one (how to crush transgressive impulses, how finally to purify myself of sinful urges), but its exact opposite: how can I break out of his vicious cycle of the Law and desire, of the Prohibition and its transgression, within which I can assert my living passions only in the guise of their opposite, as a morbid death drive?18

Paul’s answer, according to Žižek, comes in the form of an anachronistic “death of God”

theology. Indeed, Žižek offers a rather strange interpretation of Judaism’s relationship to the

Law, the Torah, for which we find little if any evidence in the history of Judaism. In the Book of

Job, we find a bet between “the satan” (tempter) figure and God. The bet concerns the

motivation for humanity’s obedience to God. Žižek interprets Job’s experience to be

characteristic of the Jewish experience of God. The Jew recognizes that God is utterly impotent,

present but powerless. Jews follow the Law, the Torah, not out of necessity, but by choice. They

16 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992). 17 Romans 7:14-20 (New Revised Standard Version). 18 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 149.

know that the Law does not have any justification beyond its own declaration. God is only real

for the Jew through the Law; God’s action is enacted through a life lived according to Torah. In

other words, the Jew knows that God does not exist, but Jews allow God to continue to insist and

persist by following Torah. What is ironic here is that Žižek interprets Paul as the decisive break

between Judaism and Christianity, and this happens precisely in the notion of the dissolution of

Law. If Jews already had this unplugged experience of the Law, however, why would not Paul

just teach that? The answer, it seems, is that it is not enough for someone to know that God does

not exist; God herself has to learn that she does not exist.

For Žižek, Christ is sort of a reincarnation of the figure of Job. Whereas Job silently

acknowledges the impotence of God, Christ is God himself acknowledging his own impotence in

silent death. While Jews operated for centuries with the knowledge that the Law is impotent,

Christ and Paul, as his messenger, now make this understanding of the Law universal—it is now

open to everyone. This is the Truth-Event for Žižek, whereas Badiou finds it in the “fable” of the

resurrection. For Žižek, the resurrection exists as the collective of “believers” themselves. They

are bound together in communist love for one another, obligated to each other. The revelation of

the Christ-Event, then, is that God was always-already dead. Now that the collective understands

that there is no guarantee to the community, that there is no “big Other” watching over the

community, its members are free at last. However, this interpretation contrasts with Žižek’s claim

that people need to at least believe there is some sort of power working through them:

Many of my atheist friends say to me: ‘Yes, so this is atheism: there’s no god up there, we

create god in our image, and so on.’ But it is not that: I don’t think one can translate

theology into secular humanism. Not because of any secret, obscure reason but because

there must be a moment of thinking that it is not we who are acting, but a higher force that

is acting through us. This element has to be maintained.19

Do we not still have a God or semi-sentient “big Other” here? What is the nature of Žižek’s

higher force? He first likens it to the slime in films like Terminator II which always recombines

after the heroes thought they had destroyed it. Yet, Žižek reverses this, likening the slime or liquid

metal to the spirit of Jesus that the Romans tried to execute. Such a spirit organizes the

community of believers through the mechanism of the “higher force.” Questions remain,

however. How does this process occur? Moreover, what did Jesus actually teach? What was this

spirit of his concerned with? Žižek’s gloss on the theology should not be assumed to accurately

represent or to be the same as Paul’s “Gospel.” We know of no Christians or Jews that believe or

practice their traditions in the way that Žižek assumes. Does his account have any actual viability

if virtually no one believes in this manner?

Simon Critchley’s Paul

Critchley’s Paul is the ultimate revolutionary. Paul never experienced a conversion, in Critchley’s

view, rather Paul merely responded to a call. This call is akin to Badiou’s Truth-Event, and it is

the response to this event that creates the subject (of Truth). The call of Christ thus becomes a

model for what Critchley calls an “infinite demand,” a demand that will always exceed the

subject’s political or ethical action. Such a demand is infinite in the sense that it is always-already

deferred, it is always- almost. It resists an actual presence, but nevertheless resides in the promise. Sympathetic to anarchism, Critchley interprets Paul as claiming that “Christ was crucified

in weakness to become powerful through the resurrection. Likewise, in becoming slaves of the

19 "A Meditation on Michelangelo’s Christ on the Cross," 179-180.

Messiah, we are asked to abandon our secular, Roman life of freedom, and to assert our weakness. The power of being in Christ is a powerless power … It gives subjects a potentiality for action through rendering them impotent.”20 For Critchley, “Jesus Messiah is beyond existence, or rather he is not proven through the fact of the historical Jesus. As Paul makes clear in Galatians, when Jesus Christ was revealed to Paul in order that he might preach amongst the Gentiles, ‘I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me’ (Gal. 1:16-17).”21 This is a rather poor interpretation of Paul, for whom the historical Jesus could not have been irrelevant. Indeed, he thought he was fully in line with the kingdom announced by the historical Jesus—though this is probably historically inaccurate.22

Isn’t this why Paul eventually did go up to Jerusalem to consult with Peter and James to confirm that his interpretation of the Gospel was correct?23

Critchley prefers instead to search for a faith for the faithless. He wants “to tie the idea of

the gospel and evangelical good tidings (to euaggelion) to the verbal sense of ‘to proclaim’ or ‘to

announce’ (euaggelixomai). Faith is an announcement that enacts, a proclamation that brings the

subject of faith into being.”24 But, more importantly, this faith is not in reference to some

“transcendent, metaphysical guarantee” it is, rather, “a powerless power, a strength in

weakness.”25 According to Critchley, Paul offers a faith without a transcendent master signified

or signifier, “Faith is a word, a word whose force consists in the event of its proclamation. The

proclamation finds no support within being, whether conceived as existence or essence.”26 The

problem, though, is that the historical Paul is a monotheist who holds that God is a transcendent

master and who fully expects his vicegerent, the Lord Christ, to reign over the world.

The Failings of the Pauline Turn

Badiou, Žižek, and Critchley each embrace the promise of a collective of believers who are joined

in a non-coercive bond of mutual reliance. For them, Paul provides the example par excellence of

an ancient communist activist, a political activist who really believes in something—whether it be

a “faith of the faithless” or a “fiction” that offers the possibility of final belief. Also searching for

a “higher power” that could motivate political action, Žižek further focuses on a form of political

association which he sees as operating in Paul’s thought—which he labels “the collective of the

spirit.” We think it fair to conclude that these thinkers share the view that Paul may indeed

provide one model for political activity in response to an infinite demand.

What event did Paul actually respond to? Should it be considered to be an authentic event?

Recall that the event, in Badiou’s ontology, is the singular truth of a particular situation.

Considering that all three theorists consider the resurrection to be either a fable (Badiou,

Critchley) or an immanent- ization of God in the form of an animating collective spirit (Žižek),

we have to consider it to be hardly an actual event. Of course Badiou, Critchley, and Žižek do not

actually suggest that if we were in the first century Roman world, we should be faithful to the

truth event of the resurrection. So, why does the resurrection serve as a model? If anything, it

20 Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2014), 160. 21 Ibid., 164. 22 In Galatians, Paul describes his disputes with Peter and James, who actually knew the historical Jesus. This indicates that his

interpretation may in fact be more of a departure. Moreover, Paul does not quote Jesus but two or three times, whereas the Letter

of James quotes Jesus’ teachings often. 23 Galatians 2:1-2 (NRSV). 24 Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, 161. 25 Ibid., 163. 26 Ibid., 164.

would be merely a semblance of an actual event. This exposes a problem in Badiou’s outline of

the event, or at least his use of Paul as a model. It would seem that the historical Jesus who

actually spoke on behalf of the groups that were present in the Roman imperial order, but not re-

presented in it—e.g., the poor, the hungry, the persecuted, the slaves, and the tenant farmers—

would be a more appropriate model.

Paul proclaims a universal Lord that will require every person, no matter their social

location, to submit themselves before him. Whereas Paul’s “kingdom” proclamation does not

exclude people because of their socio-economic position, the historical Jesus takes a stand: it is

the poor who are blessed, the wealthy are not. This is much more in line with the “un-included” in

the Roman imperial “situation” (what Badiou would term the “void-of-the-situation”) acting in

fidelity to an event (of the “reign or realm of God”). And, because these “outcasts” are those that

by nature are “repressed” by the system, then they are the truth of the Roman imperial system.

Where Paul proclaims a coming Lord that will replace Caesar’s empire with God’s empire (where

the system is inverted), Jesus simply proclaims the “reign of God” without a master—it is a “reign

of God” that arrives only by doing, not believing. In the earliest layers of two of our earliest

sources for the Jesus Movement (the Q Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas), we find no

proclamation of Jesus as Lord, Messiah, or master. Yet, in Paul, we find the proclamation of a

master. As a result, Paul’s approach seems to be more akin to an imposition of authoritarian rule

than to an authentic event that challenges and overturns the established order.

Let us challenge the tenor and direction of the Pauline turn with this question: What if the

resurrection was not the event, but that the event instead was an infinite demand posed by the

egalitarian rule of (a non-metaphysical) God? After all, two thousand years is a long time to wait

for the second coming of Christ, especially considering that Paul thought it would happen in his

lifetime or shortly thereafter. Perhaps Paul was not being faithful to the resurrection as the event,

but rather to the resurrection as a semblance of the event or an undoing of the event (the reign of

God)? Žižek, for example, highlights three ways in which a truth-event can be betrayed:

[1] simple disavowal, the attempt to follow old patterns as if nothing had happened, just

a minor disturbance (the reaction of “utilitarian” liberal democracy); [2] false imitation

of the Event of truth (the Fascist staging of the conservative revolution as a pseudo-

Event); and [3] a direct “ontologization” of the Event of truth, its reduction to a new

positive order of Being (Stalinism).27

Paul transformed the event from the proclamation of an egalitarian reign of God and the teacher

that died for this infinitely demanding “cause” into a story where this teacher (as Son of God)

died on account of “our” societal sins. In Paul’s mind, this occurred so that Gentiles might be

incorporated into the one universal family of the God of Israel. Can this not be interpreted as an

undoing of the event? Here Paul offers a “master figure” that will lead the “revolution.” This

matches Žižek’s second example of the undoing of an event, for here we have a “director” in the

mold of Caesar working for justice. The generation that follows Paul (which is exhibited in the

Deutero-Pauline letters of Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus)

represents Žižek’s first example of an undoing of an event because it marks a turn toward Roman

conservative values (women are to be silent, slaves and wives are to obey their masters, honor is

to be paid to those in authority, etc.) and acts as if nothing has really changed. Finally, Žižek’s

third example is exhibited in the reign of the Church on earth as a “new positive order of Being.”

Of course, Paul did not mean to do this, but it did happen for a reason—the betrayal of the

27 Žižek, "A Meditation on Michelangelo’s Christ on the Cross," 77.

event of the infinitely demanding reign of God. Paul moves away from focusing on the reign of

God that the historical Jesus taught to talking about the very person of Jesus as the king of the

kingdom. While Paul is an incredible thinker and a gift to Western religious praxis, there are

better models for leftist social theorists to highlight. Paul can be rehabilitated, but first one needs

to be more honest about what he actually believed.

The “Reign of God” Movements

Žižek, Badiou, and Critchley each ignore the teachings of the historical Jesus. We assume that

they have done so for two primary reasons: (1) they believe the teachings of the historical Jesus

are lost to history, and (2) the Christ-myth is so influential that the teachings of Jesus recede into

the background. However, scholarship on the canonical and non-canonical gospels has uncovered

what appears to be material that can be confidently attributed to the historical Jesus. Before

analyzing some of these early speeches for their potential use in ideology critique, we will briefly

explain how these “earliest” teachings of Jesus and his followers were discovered.

Q

There has been a near consensus among scholars for roughly seventy years that the Gospel of

Mark was independently used as a source by the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

However, there are a series of instances in Matthew and Luke where there is significant overlap in

themes, illustrations, Greek vocabulary, word order, and sentence structure. There would not be

much fuss about the coincidence in pericopes in Matthew and Luke if it happened once or twice,

but when it happens throughout both gospels there, is a very good chance that we have another

source operating here. Because German scholars discovered it first they called it “Quelle,”

German for “source,” but for English-speaking scholars it is simply referred to as “Q.”

Within this reconstructed Q source, Ronald Piper uncovered a series of collections or chains of aphorisms that he called “speeches.”28 These speeches were identifiable because each

followed a pattern related to the Hellenistic practice of elaborating aphorisms that were attributed to specific individuals, which the Greeks called chreia.29 The Hellenistic speech

pattern found in the text suggests that it is most likely the work of scribes who (re)-contextualized the sayings of Jesus, while simultaneously adding their own ideas.

John S. Kloppenborg also identified the major redactional theme of “judgement on this

generation” operating in major sections of the reconstructed Q text.30 The sapiential material (the

six speeches, the prayer, the beatitudes, and the mission speech) was considered formative as

opposed to redactional because the judgment material appeared to be commenting on the

sapiential material, which suggested that the sapiential material compositionally preceded the

judgment stratum. It is part of our thesis to suggest that the material in the formative, sapiential

layer of Q served as a resource for the critique of ideology in western Galilean towns.

Gospel of Thomas

28 Ronald Piper, Wisdom in the Q-Tradition: The Aphoristic Teaching of Jesus (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press,

2004). 29 A chreia is to be distinguished from a proverb which is general wisdom that is not attributed to a specific person. 30 John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Wisdom, Reprint ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1987).

In 1945 a group of Arab Egyptians stumbled upon an ancient jar in the Upper Egyptian town of

Nag Hammadi. After much intrigue and drama, the texts were eventually recovered by a

number of Coptic scholars. Twelve codices were found in the jar with famous texts such as the

Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, The Thunder: Perfect Mind, and, most significantly, the

Gospel of Thomas. It was then determined that three Greek gospel fragments discovered in 1897

and 1903 at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt were actually earlier copies of the Gospel of Thomas from

between 130 and 250 C.E.

While many scholars initially relegated the Gospel of Thomas to the heretical dustbin of

so- called “Gnosticism,” Giles Quispel challenged this determination by postulating a series of

stratified layers and sources within the text. While Quispel’s claims about the text have been

challenged, and for the most part rejected, they opened the door to redaction criticism of the text

by a number of scholars. Among them, William Arnal noticed that:

The Gospel of Thomas shows a considerable degree of formal and thematic inconsistency,

which is one of the difficulties that prompted the redaction-critical studies of Q. Taken

alone, this inconsistency suggests that the Gospel of Thomas is a composite, in that the

traditions comprised in the document derive from various provenances. This does not,

however, suggest anything about the processes whereby these traditions were collected,

which is the critical literary question undergirding a comparison with Q.31

April DeConick offered a detailed redactional analysis of the Gospel of Thomas and identified a

major theme running throughout it.32 This theme, unlike the judgment motif in Q, was that of

“beginnings speculation.” Whereas Q looked to a future judgment and accounting, the major

redaction in Thomas looked to the beginning. Justin Lasser’s work proposes a new redactional

analysis of the Gospel of Thomas.33 While Arnal and Lasser disagree with DeConick’s

understanding of the formative stratum of Thomas, it is a good sign that all three agree on the

general picture of the major redaction of Thomas. Just as Kloppenborg peeled the

judgment/deuteronomistic redaction from Q to reveal an earlier layer, we may well have

stumbled upon an earlier (formative?) stratum of the Gospel of Thomas.

Lasser and DeConick, following Piper’s work with Q, have also discovered a series of

“speeches” or “arguments” following the Hellenistic pattern of the progymnasmata. Given that

many of the arguments in Thomas and Q share sayings that appear in different contexts in their

respective traditions, it seems right to assume that when Thomas and Q have parallel sayings, we

have identified a yet earlier common tradition behind both texts. From this common material—

perhaps we can call it the “Ur- Gospel”—we can examine the way the various common sayings

were elaborated into their respective rhetorical locations or communities. So, by tracing the

elaboration of the “Ur-Gospel” material into Q and Thomas, we can touch upon an early (if not

the earliest) form of the “Reign-of-God Movement”— something scholars often refer to as “the

Jesus Movement.” Before analyzing these early speeches in Q and Thomas, we have to consider

the situation and ideology that the movement challenged.

The First Century Galilean Context

31 William Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes: Galilean Conflicts and the Setting of Q, Kindle ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,

2001), loc. 1988-1992. 32 April DeConick, Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas: A History of the Gospel and its Growth (London: Bloomsbury

T&T Clark, 2006). 33 Justin M. Lasser, "A Path to the Beginning The Major Redaction of the Gospel of Thomas and Syrian Christian Beginnings"

(Union Theological Seminary, 2011).

In his work, The Historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan asks why the “Jesus Movement” happened in the early 20s and 30s of the first century, and why it happened in Roman Palestine. 34 Let us look at local political, social, and economic matters in lower Galilee in the 20s of the first century. 35 What we find first is a building program by one of Herod the Great’s sons, Herod Antipas—the Herod that the historical Jesus would have known. While we often imagine the Romans ruling the world with the sword, their most effective control mechanism was economic integration and participation. This was demonstrated in the coins celebrating the victory of the Romans and the divinity of their emperors. (Coins were not just a feature of the economy, they embodied imperial theology.) The Romans set out to commercialize the hinterlands of the empire in order to bring them into the orbit of major cities that were more Hellenized and therefore Romanized. John Crossan and Jonathan Reed compare this effort to the Herodian program of colonization and marketization of the Galilee:

Look down this hierarchy from top to bottom: from the Roman Empire of Caesar

Augustus, through the Jewish kingdom of Herod the Great, to the Galilean-Perean

tetrarchy of Herod Antipas. In reverse, from bottom to top: Antipas to Herod to

Augustus. The Herodians are not greater than the Romans in anything, but they are

miniatures of them in everything. Romanization meant urbanization, which meant

commercialization. Watch, then, how, first, Herod the Great built a Roman full-

kingdom and, after him but imitative of him, his son Antipas built a Roman bit-

kingdom on Jewish soil.36

Herod the Great was an Idumean Jewish convert and initially worked within the then-ruling

Jewish dynasty of the Hasmoneans of the 50s and 40s of the first century B.C.E. Being politically

astute, he correctly anticipated the eventual triumph of the Romans over their Parthian-backed

supporters. In 40 B.C.E., Herod asked the Roman Senate to grant him the lands of Idumea,

Galilee, Judea, and Samaria. He was given the title of “King of the Jews” and was sent back to

Palestine to pacify the region and rule as a client king of the Roman Empire. After much bloody

struggle, Herod reigned supreme and began a major building program that also sent an important

message to the Romans—“You can trust me, I am a servant of Rome.” His founding of the city of

Caesarea Maritima on the Mediterranean coast sent a similar message and further sought to

integrate Herod’s kingdom into the Roman commercial empire. Herod also instituted a major

refurbishing and building project in Jerusalem with the intention of making Jerusalem a city that

would rival other major cities of the Roman Empire such as Alexandria, Ephesus, and Antioch.

Crossan and Reed note how these two building projects reflected Herod’s two identities: Roman

client king and the “King of the Jews.” Caesarea Maritima was a Roman city that reflected Roman

34 John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, Reprint ed. (New York:

HarperOne, 1993). 35 The historical Jesus is often portrayed as providing a non-violent program that deliberately opposed the Jewish Zealots who

rebelled violently against Rome and as predicting the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. If Jesus was primarily active in the 20s

and early 30s of the first century, though, why would he be resisting a movement that had not yet consolidated? Why would he be

predicting the destruction of the Temple some forty years in advance? It seems more likely that the later gospel writers, who were

writing after these events had already taken place, engaged in their own attempts at interpreting these traumatic events by linking

them to a local folk hero who lived forty years earlier. Clearly, the gospel writers rarely give us the historical Jesus, but instead give

us a Jesus that answers the questions of their respective eras of the 70s C.E. (Mark), the 80s (Matthew), and the 90’s (Luke). Still,

while the synoptic gospel authors wrote after the First Revolt (66-70 C.E.), they were all using sources from an earlier era. 36 John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts, (New

York: HarperCollins, 2003). Kindle edition. loc. 1924-1928.

social hierarchy and commercial ethos, whereas the rebuilding of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem

exhibited his status as the pious “King of the Jews.” While Herod rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem

to the one and only God of the Jews, Yahweh, he simultaneously built a temple to the goddess

Roma and the divine son of god Augustus in Caesarea.

Herod the Great died in 4 B.C.E., and his will divided his kingdom between his three

sons. As but one of the heirs, though, Herod Antipas was refused the title of “King of the Jews”

and granted the title of Tetrarch, the “ruler of one quarter” of the kingdom of the Jews. When

Augustus Caesar died in 14 C.E., he was succeeded by emperor Tiberias. Having learned from

his father’s political move with Caesarea, Antipas set out to build a city in the name of the new

emperor. While Herod the Great had dotted Judea, Samaria, and Idumea with building projects,

little had been done in the Galilee. Seeing the potential for filling his coffers with the surplus of

the rich agricultural region of the Galilee, Antipas set the foundations for his city on the southern

Galilean coast. Antipas intended his city of Tiberias to exhibit his fidelity to the new Caesar. The

commercialization that the city of Tiberias inaugurated would have been felt by the local towns

along the western rim of the Sea of Galilee. Antipas also renovated the city of Sepphoris, a city

just two miles from Nazareth, which had been sacked by the Syrian Roman legion after a small

uprising a few years before. These two cities, Sepphoris and Tiberias, represented a building

project that had been intended to win Antipas the affection of Tiberias, and thus the title of “King

of the Jews” (something which never happened). Crossan and Reed note that the

first coins Herod Antipas struck at Sepphoris and Tiberias show the tightrope he walked between trying to build a Jewish kingdom in the Roman world: they avoided his image

and, instead, bore representations such as reeds, palm branches, and palm trees, symbols that were appropriately Jewish, but not necessarily foreign to the wider Greco-Roman

world.37

For Antipas, balancing Jewish theological commitments (his were suspect38) and fidelity to

Rome was not easy.

Beyond Antipas’ interest in making a name for himself and attracting the eye of Tiberias

Caesar, he intended to extract the agricultural surplus from the Galilean countryside. Whereas

Caesarea Maritima connected the coastal regions to the Mediterranean market, the hinterlands of

Galilee lacked any clear center of trade. Integrating the Galilee into his kingdom, and thereby

Rome’s, was a chief concern for Antipas. By building Tiberias on the southwestern coast of the

Sea of Galilee, Antipas altered the economy of the Galilean region with the intent of siphoning off

its surplus. This shift is evinced in the minting of coins, although the fact that such local coins

“are relatively sparse even in Galilee itself indicates that the economy was not already monetized

and that it was not easily or quickly monetized by Antipas.”39 According to William Arnal,

“These foundations had a decisive effect on Galilean economic production and organization (as

was precisely their intention). This effect in turn was socially disruptive on a day-to-day basis,

and, among other things, changed the character of rural social organization and hierarchy. It is

against such a context that Q reacts.”40 We would add that these economic disruptions also

represented a focus for both the first layer of the Gospel of Thomas and perhaps even the

37 Ibid., loc. 2083-2086. 38 This is why he divorced his non-Jewish wife and married his half-brother’s Hasmonean (i.e., Jewish) wife. John the Baptist is

remembered for criticizing this move, which appears to have been the primary reason he lost his head. 39 William Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes: Galilean Conflicts and the Setting of Q, Kindle ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,

2001), loc. 1988-1992. 40 Ibid., loc. 1484-1491.

historical Jesus.

The following table highlights the contrasting social and economic situations in

Galilee both prior to and after the founding of Tiberias.41

The Galilee before the founding of Tiberias Antipas’ program for integrating the Galilee

People lived in small collective villages Growth of larger estates controlled by elite absentee

landlords in the city

“Maintenance-oriented” small farms Profit-oriented plantations

Families owned enough land to feed their

families with little surplus

Farms were bought and former owners were hired as

tenants increasing the “labor-to-product ratio”

Villages were “self-regulating” Lands were owned by absentee landlords

Little division of labor Division of labor among laborers and tenants

Villagers banded together to help one another

harvest

Laborers were given defined tasks

Shared use of village agricultural technologies

(e.g., winepresses, olive presses, tools, threshing

equipment, etc.)

Farming equipment was owned by the landlords

Little evidence of money hoarding With monetization one finds an increase in monetary

hoarding in the cities

Exchange of goods was primarily performed with

a barter system

Exchange of goods were to be done with coin—this would

make the surplus in the Galilee easier to move to cities like

Sepphoris and then on to Caesarea or Tyre on the coast

A belief that Yahweh owned the land, and that it

was granted to families

An effort to urbanize through monetization

Farming primarily for subsistence and some

leisure products (such as wine)—this was for the

benefit of the peasantry and their villages

Encouragement of cash-cropping and specialization—this

benefitted the elite classes in the city

The table above underscores Arnal’s claim that Q represents a village reaction to the

monetization and commercialization of the lower Galilee by Antipas. The purveyors of the

earlier layers in the Gospel of Thomas most likely participated in this critique and resistance as

well.

The formative strata of Q and Thomas, following the work of Kloppenborg, Arnal, and

Lasser, can be placed in the context of the lower-Galilean response to the socio-economic and

ideological changes that the foundation of Tiberias (and rebuilding of Sepphoris, twelve miles

or so away) inaugurated c. 18-23 C.E. The critique of ideology performed in the Q material

harkens back to an egalitarian way of life which probably never existed, but persisted as an

ideal in the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible and in parts of the Torah. This critique

contrasted the commercializing empire of Rome and Antipas with an empire ruled by the

Jewish God, Yahweh—what Jesus called “malkuta dismayya,” (in Greek, the “basileia tou

theou”).

41 This information is derived from ibid.; John S. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel

(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000); The Tenants in the Vineyard: Ideology, Economics, and Agrarian Conflict in Jewish

Palestine (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2010).

The “Reign of God” Movements

For over a generation, historical Jesus scholarship interpreted the early Q material to be evidence

of a wandering itinerant movement. Arnal and Kloppenborg have challenged this depiction by

concentrating on the fact that Q was clearly a text and represented the interests of settled

communities. Arnal proposed that the “mission” speech in Q—often interpreted as the earliest

evidence of the “Jesus Movement”—represented a program. Let’s take a look at this “speech”

with the earlier Thomas version next to it:

Given that wandering itinerant sages do not normally write texts such as Q, the context outlined

Gospel of Thomas Q Gospel

Speech III

Challenge: 6.1 His followers asked him: “Do you want us to

fast? In what way should we fast? Should we give alms?

What foods should we not eat?” Proposition/Chreia: 14.1

Jesus said to them: “If you fast you will produce sin for

yourselves. And if you pray, you will be condemned. And if

you give alms you will do harm to your spirits.”

Example: 14.2 And in whatever land you enter and in which

you walk, if they receive you eat whatever is put before you,

and heal the sick among them.

Rationale: 14.3 For, what goes into your mouth will not

pollute you; rather, that which comes from your mouth will

pollute you.”

Q 9:57-61

And someone said to him: I will follow you

wherever you go.

And Jesus said to him: Foxes have holes, and birds of the sky

have nests; but the son of humanity does not have anywhere

he can lay his head.

But another said to him: Master, permit me first to go and

bury my father.

But he said to him: Follow me, and leave the dead to bury

their own dead.

Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say

farewell to those at my home.”

Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and

looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Q 10:2-16

He said to his disciples: The harvest is plentiful, but the

workers are few. So ask the Lord of the harvest to dispatch

workers into his harvest.

Be on your way! Look, I send you like sheep in the midst of

wolves.

Carry no purse, no knapsack, nor sandals, nor stick, and

greet no one on the road.

Into whatever house you enter, first say: Peace to this house!

And if a son of peace be there, let your peace come upon

him; but if not, let‚ your peace return upon you. And at that

house remain «eating and drinking whatever they provide»,

for the worker is worthy of one’s reward. Do not move

around from house to house. And whatever town you enter

and they take you in, «eat what is set before you». And cure

the sick there, and say to them: The kingdom of God has

reached unto you.

But into whatever town you enter and they do not take you

in, on going out ·from that town‚ shake off the dust from

your feet.

Whoever takes you in takes me in, and‚ whoever takes me in

takes in the one who sent me.

in the sections above suggests that these were instructions for “messengers” for local towns on

the southwestern rim of the Sea of Galilee. These “missionaries” or “messengers” were trying to

encourage the local towns to join this “reign of God” movement in opposition to the ideological

program represented by the foundation of Tiberias. The messengers were sent to local towns

with a particular (lack of) garb on purpose. They “carry no purse, no knapsack” in order to

demonstrate their dependence on both God and their neighbors.

They clearly expected to be welcomed as sages. They were not merely searching for

wisdom, they were bringing a program, and that program was referred to as the “reign of God.”

They wore no sandals to demonstrate their poverty and commitment, and carried no “stick” so

as to come defenseless—in other words, they were not a threat. They hoped that people would

join this “reign of God” movement as a means of resisting commodification and

commercialization. They believed that if each village “signed on” to the movement, they would

be successful in recovering the ideal form of being Israel (as depicted in the great social

prophets like Amos and Micah).

The “program” proclaimed by these messengers was concerned with showing what the

Galilee would be like if “God” were in charge. We should not miss the significance of the Greek

word for this; basileia is also the way one would refer to the Roman empire. In other words, to

talk about the “empire of God” was to challenge the “empire of Rome.” The Romans clearly got

the joke of comparing the “empire of God” with the “empire of Rome,” but they were not

laughing. When we find the early “reign of God” movement blessing the poor and hungry, they

are not merely declaring their “spiritual” innocence. This was a political and religious program:

if the towns followed the teachings of the “reign of God” movement, then the poor would be

blessed and the hungry fed. Consider this speech from the first layer of Q:

Proposition/Chreia: Love your enemies and pray for those persecuting you, so that

you may become sons of your Father, Rationale: for he raises his sun on bad and ·good and rains on the just and unjust.

Example: The one who slaps you on the cheek offer him the other as well; and to the

person wanting to take you to court and get your shirt, turn over to him‚ the coat as

well.

Example: «And the one who conscripts you for one mile, go with him a second.»

Example: To the one who asks of you, give; and ·from the one who borrows, do not ·ask‚

back

·«what is»‚ yours.

Judgment: And the way you want people to treat you, that is how you treat

them. Rhetorical Questions: If you love those loving you, what reward do

you have?

Do not even tax collectors do the same?

And if you lend «to those» from whom you hope to receive, what <reward do> you <

have>? Do not even the Gentiles‚ do the same? Conclusion: Be full of pity, just as your Father is full of pity.42

If God were in charge, then people would love their enemies, forgive debts, provide for the

needs of each other, share burdens, and operate with compassion.

Based on the Q and Thomas texts,43 then, we can reconstruct a social history of the

42 Q 6: 27-36 (International Q Project translation). 43 While there are other early Christian texts (e.g., the synoptic Gospels and the writings of Paul), these two sayings-gospel texts (in

their earliest layers) represent the earliest material from which to view the early “reign of God” movement. We lose reference to this

communities that produced and shared them, to wit: Following the sage-like pattern of the

historical Jesus, a small number of followers started to talk about Jesus’ teachings. The followers

or messengers spread the teachings throughout various meal/symposia settings, and the ideas

grew in popularity. As a result, Jesus of Nazareth became a sort of folk hero in the region of the

Galilee. Eventually a small group, perhaps in Capernaum on the northwestern cost of the Sea of

Galilee, started to imagine Jesus’ teachings as part of a program that might help them resist the

commodification and commercialization brought by Herod Antipas.

Village scribes in the Galilee started to elaborate the sayings of Jesus and even began to

invent new ones in line with his teachings according to the chreia-elaborative schemes that they

learned in the Hellenistic gymnasia. Many of these elaborations were written down in the form of

small speeches of the sort that we find in both Thomas and Q. After these speeches were

composed, various volunteers would follow in the footsteps of Jesus and set off as itinerant sages

to bring the “good news” (gospel) of the “reign of God” movement to different towns along the

northwestern rim of the Sea of Galilee. Their message was often presented to the local elders in

the meal setting, following the Q and Thomas “mission” speeches by exchanging a teaching and

care for the sick for a meal and fellowship.44 Such an exchange was customary for a sage, but in

this context, its primary purpose was to encourage participation in the “reign of God” movement.

The program of these itinerant sages (like the historical Jesus) and sedentary village

scribes (those responsible for writing Q) drew on their particular interpretations of the teachings

of Jesus. For example, they believed that the “reign of God” of which Jesus spoke was to be

realized through a de- emphasis on material goods (money, commodities) conjoined with a

renewed emphasis on local co- dependence. In such an idealized economy, participants were to

care for others more than themselves. The poor were to be cared for and the hungry were to be

fed. Indeed, if anyone was hungry or poor it was incumbent upon the community to take a shared

responsibility in the collective. There was no coercion here; the village was invited to

participate. In this idealized community, members had the “right” to use what was needed, but

they did not have a “right” to withhold necessities.

In understanding the program of the “reign of God” movements, it helps to recall that

ideologies or belief systems serve a variety of functions for individuals, groups, and systems. As

a form of theory, ideologies begin with a diagnosis and a critical evaluation of contemporary

society. As action-oriented theory, ideologies seek to advance a particular vision of a better

society by making recommendations for directing social and political change. Any ideological

framework, then, is comprised of three essential elements: (1) diagnosis: an ontology of the

political world, a description and explanation of how political life works, a statement what is

wrong with the world; (2) evaluation: a utopian vision or a set of values and goals that, if

realized, would realize the desired values and make the world a better place; and (3) action

orientation: a theory of social and political change, a plan of action for getting from here (where

we are) to there (where we want to be).45 In short, the views of the “reign of God” movements,

early movement in the second layers of Q and Thomas, as it morphs into something scholars refer to as the “Jesus movement.” In

the latter case, we find Jesus as a retroactive “founder” of the community. Their faithfulness to the ideals of the movement are

replaced by their fidelity to Jesus as an authority and founder. One was in the movement not by acting as if one were in the reign of

God, but rather by following Jesus’ teachings. This subtle shift (from “reign of God” movement to “Jesus movement”) takes on a

more mythological form in the Gospel of Mark. This narrative (which made sense of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple) was

far more compelling after the Jewish War than the hopeful and confident proclamation of the “reign of God.” Now, the “kingdom of

God” referred to a kind of apocalyptic expectation. Paul, who rarely, if ever, mentions any of the teachings of Jesus appears to not

know the teachings of the “reign of God” movement. He rather elevates the crucified Jesus to the status of God’s vicegerent that will

come again (parousia) to reign on behalf of God, thus encouraging communities to prepare for Christ’s return. 44 For a detailed analysis of this “open commensality” between sages, healings, and the sharing of meals, see Crossan, The

Historical Jesus. 45 Kenneth Dolbeare and Linda Metcalf, American Ideologies Today: Shaping the New Politics of the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York:

like those of any other group, serve to provide people with an understanding of the world, some

sense of both personal identity and solidarity with others, and finally, a spur and guide for

political action.

As noted above, the “reign of God” movements in the Galilee certainly opposed many

features of the social, economic, and political order of the day. They disliked such social

conventions as codes of honor or shame; they criticized a family structure built along notions of

kinship through bloodlines. The movements attacked the advent of a commodified and monetized

economy; they opposed reigning practices of land ownership and predatory lending; and they

bristled at lost financial stability. Naturally, they were also highly critical of Roman imperial

domination. All in all, we can characterize their understanding of the “reign of God” as a utopian

vision of a self-regulating community rooted in such values as mutual dependence, collective

social and economic responsibility, a notion of “family” as a set of relations defined by

commitment, a barter economy, and a culture of sharing.

Contemporary Perspectives

The ideas and practices of the “reign of God” movement are significant enough for providing an

alternative understanding of the foundations of Christianity. They also show that religious

teachings can indeed embody criticisms of existing social, economic, and political relations. In a

word, religion can be a source of ideology critique. As we have shown, this is certainly true at the

level of the text and the suggestive evidence that ancient texts can provide. The question

remaining unanswered by the analysis so far is whether or not the critique goes further than

recovered words and reconstructed social histories. Ideology critique, like the broader social

change of which it is a part, cannot be just about the saying. It must also be about the doing.

The focus on doing, on action, is an important part of the contemporary world of radical

theory and practice. In the last few decades, a number of post-Marxist theorists, along with

Marxists in the autonomist tradition, have come to acknowledge that familiar certitudes about

social and political change no longer hold sway. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, for example,

observed that in the hegemonic contests that characterize capitalist society, the working-class

identity of the revolutionary subject could no longer be taken for granted.46 Similarly, Michael

Hardt, Antonio Negri, and John Holloway, have all argued that traditional socialist verities need to

be jettisoned in the context of new social forms.47 Ideas that revolutions are brought about by

structural inevitabilities and foreordained subjects simply do not match the experiences that

people have in economies that are information-based and globalized or in societies that function

through biopower and spectacle. Instead of relying on the maxims of historical materialism, the

focus has shifted to the centrality of struggle.

Even more noteworthy than this shift in Marxist thought has been the rejuvenation of

anarchism. As Saul Newman notes, “Given the decline of Marxism as both a political and

theoretical project—and given the desire for a politics that avoids statism, authoritarianism, class

essentialism and economism—perhaps it is time to invoke the anarchist tradition, or at least

reflect more seriously upon it as a radical political alternative.”48 Since the early 1990s, self-

identified anarchists have been at the center of movements of resistance to globalized capitalism,

McGraw-Hill, 1993). 46 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). 47 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); John Holloway, Change the

World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, New ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2005). 48 Saul Newman, "Anarchism, Poststructuralism and the Future of Radical Politics," SubStance: A Review of Theory &

Literary Criticism 36, no. 2 (2007): 12.

environmental destruction, war, dispossession, and exclusion.49 Its emphasis on direct action,

horizontal organizations, and cultural experimentation have played a significant role in shaping

Occupy Wall Street and subsequent protests against the global financial crisis and austerity

measures. These actions and a growing academic literature have combined to frame anarchism

“as a set of tactics for challenging authority and as a working vision of a better world that is

always in the offing.”50

In what follows, our aim will be to show that the ideas and practices of the “reign of God”

movements in the first century resonate with those of today’s autonomist and anarchist

tendencies. In doing so, the task is not merely to identify unexpected similarities between

disparate peoples across the millennia. Rather, the project is to show that that ideology critique—

conceived as simultaneously a discursive and a political practice—may indeed operate in similar

ways no matter which particular society may be under scrutiny.

Discursive practice

Inspired by the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe demonstrated that ideology

critique and ideological change occur in the context of hegemonic struggle. Neither the

participants nor the outcomes of that struggle, though, are predetermined; both are constituted by

and in the course of the struggle itself. Their work inaugurated an approach to studying ideology

rooted in discourse analysis, a subject which Laclau further developed in later work.51 One merit

of the approach is that it focuses on hegemonic contests, typically seen as a clash between two

great contending ideologies—one upholding the status quo, one challenging it. Not all ideological

contests are binary, but this is the paradigm case.

Movements and the ideologies they promote thus develop through two mechanisms—

logics of difference (using signifiers to establish the boundary between inside and outside,

between us and them) and logics of equivalence (using signifiers to bring challengers to the status

quo together under an umbrella idea). Following Laclau, we can explore the discursive operations

by which these logics operate within ideologies and show how ideological variants manage their

boundaries in the course of competing for prominence or adherents. From what we know, the

“reign of God” movement found itself in just such a hegemonic contest.52 It sought to

delegitimize Roman imperial rule and its economic consequences in the Galilee. In this effort, as

we noted, the movement’s sages ironically used the term “empire” as a way of contrasting Roman

rule with that of the coming “reign of God.” Only empires can exercise rule over us, they seem to

have said, but some empires are better than others. The imperial power of Rome and its

counterparts in Jerusalem equally stood in the way of both the autonomy of village communities

and, more importantly, the renewal of the covenant. In Galilee, as Richard Horsley has noted, “the

popular prophetic movements and the popular messianic movements were following distinctively

Israelite ‘scripts’ based on memories of God’s original acts of deliverance led by the great

prophets Moses and Joshua or by the young David as the people’s ‘messiah.’ Memories of these

founding events were still alive in villager communities, ready to inform the people’s collective

49 Richard J. F. Day, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2005); Uri

Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2008); Leonard Williams,

"Anarchism Revived," New Political Science 29, no. 3 (2007). 50Randall Amster, Anarchism Today (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), xiv. 51 Ernesto Laclau, ed. The Making of Political Identities (London: Verso, 1994); Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996);

On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005); The Rhetorical Foundations of Society (London: Verso, 2014). 52 Of course, there is some debate about social relations and economic conditions in first-century Galilee. For an overview, see

Mark Rapinchuk, "The Galilee and Jesus in Recent Research," Currents in Biblical Research 2, no. 2 (2004).

action in circumstances of social crisis."53 However, there are other scholars, such as Burton

Mack, Gerald Downing, and Leif Vaage,54 who argue that the concept of the “reign of God” as

reflected in the earliest layer of Q is the product of a cynic milieu, rather than a specific

romanticization of a lost imperial Davidic-Solomonic dynasty. In this sense, a cynic- like notion

of the “reign of God” would be a self-adopted “way” of life, rather than an imposed order. 5554

The ideological boundary thus established, it remained for messengers to travel the land,

speak with people, and win allies. In hegemonic struggles, building a coalition of opponents to

the established order involves the use of “empty signifiers,” which make unity in opposition

possible by giving people a common language or symbol—especially one that folks can interpret

in various ways.56 Certainly, the “reign of God” is just such a signifier. Devoid of determinate

content, no one quite knows what such a reign might be or what it might be like. Believers,

adherents, and possible converts would be free to fill in the details as their own imaginations saw

fit. Further, the movement’s recruiters also employed signifiers that simultaneously framed their

identity and encouraged others to accept them. By carrying no stick and wearing no sandals, for

instance, the sages showed to all the world that they were neither threatening to anyone nor much

different from anyone else in Galilee. With recruiters having the right talk and the right look,

then, the possibility of expanding the opposition remained a real one.

Ideological and political struggles such as those in Galilee are usually conceived in the

manner set forth by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto.57 The history of class struggle in any

epoch, they observed, generally reduced to a story of two great contending classes—master and

slave, lord and serf, bourgeois and proletarian. To be sure, the historical analyses that Marx and

Engels produced were more nuanced, but the binary trope has long remained attractive. For many

radical activists and thinkers, the industrial working class continues to be the prototypical

revolutionary subject—no others need apply. That privileged position has been challenged in

recent decades not only by post-structuralist opposition to so-called “master narratives,” but also

by Marxist theorists who have recognized that capitalism no longer provides the luxury of

knowing who the saviors are. In this context, the work of Hardt and Negri offers another

important take on the antagonisms and struggles of the day.58

For Hardt and Negri, forces such as globalization, “immaterial labor,” and biopower have

altered the traditional dynamics of capitalist society. As a result, our conceptions of society,

economics, and politics all need to be rethought in order to capture this more fluid, dynamic, and

networked order. Hardt and Negri christened this new order “Empire,” contrasted it with imperial

and sovereign powers of the past, and analyzed its ability to control production, politics, and

social life in a myriad of ways. Lest advocates of social change begin to despair, though, Hardt

53 Richard Horsley, "Jesus Movements and the Renewal of Israel," in Christian Origins: A People's History of Christianity, ed.

Richard Horsley (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 16. 54 Burton L. Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins, Reprint ed. (New York: HarperOne, 2013); Francis

Gerald Downing, Cynics and Christian Origins (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2000); Leif E. Vaage, Galilean Upstarts: Jesus'

First Followers According to Q (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994). 55 The historical Jesus refrained from talking about “God” and preferred to talk about the realm or reign of God. This is much

more in line with Critchley’s notion of faith being action as opposed to belief. Who God was was not discussed by Jesus, nor did

he present himself as the, or even, a messiah. His lifestyle was much like that of Epictetus, the Cynic: “without a city, without a

house, without possessions, without a slave; I sleep on the ground; I have no wife, no children, no praetorium, but only the earth

and heavens, and one poor cloak …” (Epictetus, Discourses 3.22:45-49, Oldfather 2.146-147). Note, though, that scholars such as

Crossan and Mack do not claim that Jesus was a cynic philosopher, rather the cynics provide the closest analogy to his views. 56 Laclau, Emancipation(s), 36-46. 57 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, (Marxists Internet Archive, 2010

[1848]), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf. 58 Hardt and Negri, Empire; Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).

and Negri (following Michel Foucault) quickly acknowledge that power and sovereignty cannot

exist without also engendering and constructing forms of resistance. Resistance to Empire

emerges from the multitude, conceived as a hybridized collection of people around the globe who

“are driven at base not only by the struggle against misery and poverty but also by a profound

desire for democracy—a real democracy of the rule of all by all based on relationships of equality

and freedom.”59 Similar to the “movement of movements” that characterized protests against

globalization, the multitude provides Hardt and Negri with the sort of distributed network that can

challenge a pervasive and invasive imperial power.

Although Galilee in the first century clearly did not share the systematic features of our

globalized order, the “reign of God” movement described above did show some qualities that are

resonant with the concept of the multitude. For one, the “reign of God” movement appears to

have operated like a distributed network. There seems to have been no central headquarters

issuing orders, no single acknowledged leader making authoritative speeches. Although the texts

we have provide something like instructions for the movement’s roving messengers, the

instructions may not have been any more stringent than a dress code, say. Messengers likely had

freedom to portray the “reign of God” as they saw fit, based no doubt upon their own

communicative style and upon whatever questions and concerns village elders expressed.

For another, the social standing of movement participants was clearly not a high one.

Without an industrial proletariat or a tradition of labor activism, there could have been no sense

of a privileged revolutionary subjectivity among the Q community peoples. Like the multitude in

Hardt and Negri’s account, people in the “reign of God” movement probably lived outside the

center of Galilean social, economic, and political life. Indeed, the "frequent attention to debts and

their cancellation” in their rhetoric points to their intended target—“an audience still on the land

but unable to make ends meet, given the demands for taxes and tribute."60 If their social and

economic situation made them peripheral to begin with, they already had the credibility to

criticize people in power and to make common cause with similarly situated others. As Horsley

notes:

Some of the principal leaders of the Jesus movements were apparently ‘downwardly

mobile’ people with direct experience of indebtedness to the very power holders who

were oppressing the people with heavy taxation and interest on loans prohibited by

Israelite covenantal law. These leaders would have had an unusually poignant sense of

how the Israelite ideal of a life of cooperation and justice in semi-independent, self-

sustaining communities was disintegrating.61

Given their status, they could construct a discourse that highlighted the concerns of those left

behind by the social and economic changes that were transforming Galilee. Arnal adds that Q

exhibits the features of a “rhetoric of uprootedness.” He claims that this “downwardly mobile”

group must have included the village scribes—hence the assumption that Q was a text, and not

just an oral tradition.62

Perhaps a better sense of what the Galileans may have been up to can be gained from

59 Multitude, 67. 60 Horsley, "Jesus Movements and the Renewal of Israel," 27. 61 Ibid., 29-30. 62 Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, chapter 5.

John Holloway’s compelling statement: “In the beginning is the scream.”63 For Holloway, all of

the trappings of revolutionary theory and practice come down to one thing—the scream. The

scream is an articulation of frustration, anger, and dissatisfaction at the unjust society that we

inhabit. The scream is the voice of our spirit, the spring of our actions, and the source of our

rebellion, “Our scream is a scream to break windows, a refusal to be contained, an overflowing, a

going beyond the pale, beyond the bounds of polite society.”64

The autonomist strain within Marxism stresses the importance of struggle, and

Holloway’s work reminds us that, while it may sometimes appear futile, resistance is ever

present. Indeed, in the first century, Galilee saw a series of peasant revolts and resistance

movements. "Almost all of these revolts, protests, and movements were directed both against the

foreign imperial rule of the Romans and against the Herodian and high priestly rulers in

Jerusalem."65 As we would expect, these movements did not operate unhindered, nor were they

ultimately able to throw off the yoke. They faced strong counter-insurgency efforts from the

forces of Rome and Jerusalem alike. Indeed, passages in Mark and Q show that "the movements

had come to the attention of the rulers of Galilee and other territories, who periodically took

repressive action to check the growth of the movement."66 Military force, general brutality, and

targeted executions, all worked effectively in achieving that aim.

What the long history of revolts and insurrections—whether by peasants, workers, or

students—reveals is that power is enormously resilient. The established order has all the resources

it needs, and it has a strong interest in protecting its social, economic, and political position.

Popular forces either trying to defend and preserve a way of life or, more ambitiously, seeking to

alter the very foundations of social order always seem to be lacking. In an age of distributed

imperial power, storming a Bastille is less of an option when the sites themselves are hidden. In

an age of pervasive biopower, the very subjectivities we rely on for revolution have been

constructed and shaped by power itself. In an age of spectacle, the possibilities for gaining a

foothold for ideology critique seem greatly limited by the amusements and distractions produced

by the culture industry.

Political practice

It is true that we scream, and we talk, but our vocalizations mean little unless we also act. The

imperative to act is rooted in a demand that calls us to an “ethics of commitment and politics of

resistance.”67 Recognition of this demand has helped make anarchism, with its thoroughgoing

critique of authority, appealing to poststructuralist thinkers and anti-authoritarian activists alike.

Anarchism today rests on “an ethical duty to question and resist domination in all its forms.”68 In

accepting that duty and meeting its demands, anarchists challenge the state and question

authority—whenever and wherever they seek to totalize social relations or dominate political

practices. What anarchism brings to politics, in other words, is a pervasive and compelling spirit

63 Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, 1. 64 Ibid., 6.

65 Horsley, "Jesus Movements and the Renewal of Israel," 15. 66 Ibid., 36. 67 Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 3. 68 Saul Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,

2001), 166.

of revolt—a “spectacular, creative and imaginative disturbance of the state.”69

The question, then, is not whether to act, but how to act—toward what ends, following

what principles, and with what spirit? Marxism, framed as a theory focused on the seizure of state

power, generally has postponed answering such questions to a distant, ever-receding time (after

the revolution), when it has not ignored them altogether. By contrast, the anarchist tradition brings

such questions front and center. As Todd May has noted, anarchism operates as a tactical

theory—a theory of social and political practice—not a strategic one, focused on obtaining an

ultimate goal.70 As a tactical theory, anarchism should be seen as a practical doctrine, as a creed

formed in the context of activism, as a form of thinking through doing. In both past and present,

then, “the bulk of ongoing anarchist praxis and discourse takes place on the micro level of face-

to-face collectives and affinity groups, and the meso level of the local milieu or (mini-)network of

anarchists in a particular locale, such as a town or city.”71

Doing what one can, wherever one can, however one can, provides the only prospect of

making headway in the battle against the machine. One cannot focus on seizing state power

because doing so would simply reinstitute a key source of oppression. As Holloway reminds us,

“You cannot build a society of non-power relations by conquering power. Once the logic of power

is adopted, the struggle against power is already lost.”72 Rather, the point of political activity is to

act as if one were already free. Anarchist practice is built upon a preference for self-directed

action, for cooperation without hierarchy or domination, for a prefigurative politics. This

standpoint has been labeled the “anarchist squint” by James Scott, whose studies of popular

movements and everyday politics have led him to embrace “the anarchist tolerance for confusion

and improvisation that accompanies social learning, and confidence in spontaneous cooperation

and reciprocity.”73 Anarchist practice is focused on building the new society in the shell of the old,

as an old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) slogan put it. It aims to create a set of

institutions, resources, skills, and experiences that delegitimize authority and induce a change in

perspective, all the while insisting that there is an alternative to the present order.74 Anarchism “is

about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties

or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus

democracy.”75

In this context, naturally, we are not saying that the “reign of God” movement was

anarchist in nature or that its approach was proto-anarchist. Rather, we note that a number of

themes within the anarchist tradition have some resonance with what took place in first-century

Galilee. Two themes readily emerge as useful in this inquiry—affinity and insurrection.

Regarding the former, most theorists would argue that anarchists “believe that human freedom

and happiness would be best guaranteed by a society based on principles of self-organization,

voluntary association, and mutual aid, and because we reject all forms of social relations based

on systemic violence, such as the state or capitalism.”76 In contrast with top-down approaches to

69 Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 123. 70 Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,

1994). 71 Uri Gordon, "Anarchism Reloaded," Journal of Political Ideologies 12, no. 1 (2007): 33. 72 Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, 17. 73 James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), xii. 74 Howard J. Ehrlich, "How to Get from Here to There: Building Revolutionary Transfer Culture," in Reinventing Anarchy, Again,

ed. Howard J. Ehrlich (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996). 75 David Graeber, "The New Anarchists," New Left Review, no. 13 (2002): 70. 76 Andrej Grubacic, "Towards An Another Anarchism," http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/11028.

political activism, approaches focused on taking power, today’s anarchists have “an affinity for

affinity, that is, for non-universalizing, non-hierarchical, non-coercive relationships based and

[sic] mutual aid and shared ethical commitments.”77 Given the analyses of power alluded to

above, it is clear that political action cannot proceed in the manner of familiar narratives of

cataclysmic revolution. Instead, radicals have to operate through a micropolitics that recognizes

the local and contingent nature of political life. Hence, poststructuralist anarchists like Todd

May call “for social, personal, and political experimentation, the expansion of situated freedom,

the release of subjected discourses and genres, and the limitation and reorientation of the role of

the intellectual.”78

While the first-century Galilee should not be seen as a progenitor of Sixties-era hippie

communes, it is probably “best understood as a traditional agrarian society with peasants living in

relatively autonomous villages.”79 Most peasants were small landowners or tenant farmers, while

others obviously made a living from fishing. Regardless, their economic status was certainly

precarious, a form of subsistence living.80 The messengers involved in the “reign of God” or

Jesus movements came from close-knit communities, and they traveled to similar ones as they

sought allies or converts. Messengers had to have been people who had been set loose from the

land, from their homes, in order to have had the ability to go from village to village. The evidence

from texts like Q suggests that the messengers found affinity with each other, but more

importantly, sought out like-minded people in each village that they entered. Their primary focus

was to persuade the elders who held sway in village assemblies, "As the religious-political form

of local cooperation and self-governance of the semi-independent village communities, the

assemblies dealt with common concerns such as the water supply and held community prayers

and discussions."81 Not only were the messengers engaged in spreading a religious message, then,

they were essentially doing community organizing.82

Still, we should not expect to find a text from some first-century Saul Alinsky. The kind of

organizing done was more subtle, perhaps even secretive, than one might think at first. Although

the communities in the Galilee were relatively autonomous, if only because Roman rule was

indirect, they were not necessarily egalitarian. Scholars like Sean Freyne, for instance, “allow for

the possibility that the Galilee did have some ‘native princes’ and a type of ‘indigenous

aristocracy’ did develop” in the first century.83 While the village assemblies were the ultimate

authority, the elders carried great weight in their deliberations. Hence, the key to gaining converts

to the movement was to convince the elders—an effort done largely through private conversations

over communal meals. In other words, the messengers of the “reign of God” movement seemed to

have opted for a first-century version of what many of today’s radicals have adopted—“a

decentralised and temporary form of nomadic micro-politics based on alternative electronic

networking, immediacy, and the regeneration of everyday life.”84 Existing in the interstices of the

established order, the Galilean effort of building a movement in close quarters, one meal at a time,

reminds us of the iconic form of affinity-based organizing, the Temporary Autonomous Zone

77 Day, Gramsci Is Dead, 9, original emphasis.

78 May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 112. 79 Rapinchuk, "The Galilee and Jesus in Recent Research," 202. 80 Ibid., 203. 81 Horsley, "Jesus Movements and the Renewal of Israel," 28. 82 If we focus on the village scribes, who were more sedentary, the picture is somewhat different. Arnal uses the phrase “the rhetoric

of uprootedness” to underscore the notion that it was not that the scribes had no homes, but that they had been demoted in status. 83 Rapinchuk, "The Galilee and Jesus in Recent Research," 208. 84 John Armitage, "Ontological Anarchy, the Temporary Autonomous Zone, and the Politics of Cyberculture: A Critique of

Hakim Bey," Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 4, no. 2 (1999): 119.

(TAZ).

First theorized by Hakim Bey (the pseudonym of Peter Lamborn Wilson), the TAZ is an

“uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an

area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen,

before the State can crush it.”85 As Bey conceived it, the TAZ offers a potent mix of peak

experience, revolutionary fervor, and ludic carnival. In combining festival, play, and the

realization of desire, one acts to create zones of freedom (however fleeting) amid the mundane

contexts of a life marked by hierarchy, domination, and ugliness. When activists rely on the TAZ,

they command a space for momentary acts of rebellion and autonomy in those aspects of social

life where the State does not yet reach. In other words, the TAZ constitutes a tactic of protest and

prefiguration; it represents “an island of achieved social change, a place where the revolution has

actually happened, if only for a few, if only for a short time.”86

The TAZ, built on a foundation of affinity and community, emphasizes radical freedom

and spontaneous action. Another concept of Bey’s, Immediatism, further underscores the idea of

affinity that has become synonymous with anarchist organizing. The goal of Immediatism is to

cut through the Spectacle, to go beyond mediation and alienation, in order to get in touch with

the here and now. Bey observes, for example, that an “obvious matrix for Immediatism is the

party”—and he did not mean a vanguard one.87 Parties, games, shared meals, live music and

dance, and even quilting bees all exhibit the right spirit. Regardless of form, Immediatism begins

(like a dinner party) “with a group of friends trying not just to overcome isolation but also

enhance each other’s lives.”88 People thus learn the principles of affinity group formation that

will shape their other social interactions and eventually will establish the basis for a new society

and new forms of relationships. As Bey says: “We’re not kidding or indulging in hyperbole

when we insist that meeting-face-to-face is already ‘the revolution’.”89

More so than most ideologies, anarchism emphasizes practice over theory. It encourages

people to take matters into their own hands, to engage in direct action, to advance the cause

through “propaganda of the deed.” In recent years, as anarchist politics experienced a revival,

debates over the direction of the movement reappeared. In the course of those debates, the trope

of insurrection has taken root and the meme of insurrectionary anarchism become widespread—

often linked to the appearance of The Coming Insurrection.90 Foreshadowing street violence that

occurred in Greece and France in 2009, and later tied to occupations in both Europe and South

America, the book presented a brief for “new forms of activism, forms that discard older logics of

protest, visibility and organization and embrace instead spontaneity and invisibility.”91

The common link among today’s forms of activism has been this spirit of taking charge, of

acting as if one were already free, of rebellion and insurrection. As a practice, insurrectionary

anarchism is focused on letting loose or going on the attack. “Attack is the refusal of mediation,

pacification, sacrifice, accommodation, and compromise in struggle. It is through acting and

learning to act, not propaganda, that we will open the path to insurrection, although analysis and

85 Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, second ed. (Brooklyn,

NY: Autonomedia, 2003), 99, original emphasis. 86 Day, Gramsci Is Dead, 163, original emphasis. 87 Hakim Bey, Immediatism (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1994), 11. 88 Ibid., 17. 89 Ibid., 21, original emphasis. 90 The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009). For an overview of insurrectionary

anarchism today, see Leonard Williams and Brad Thomson, "The Allure of Insurrection," Anarchist Developments in Cultural

Studies, no. 1 (2011). 91 Sam Cooper, "The Coming Insurrection: Nothing Will Change Without a Revolution," Adbusters, no. 87 (2009),

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/87/coming_insurrection.html.

discussion have a role in clarifying how to act. Waiting only teaches waiting; in acting one learns

to act.”92 Amid the spectacle that governs modern life, insurrectionist activities initially occur

because of their effect on the practitioners. Their ultimate worth, though, is determined by their

effect on broader audiences, including the non-anarchist public.93 It is in this sense that “the force

of an insurrection is social, not military.”94 The insurrectionary activist focuses on the imperatives

created by the idea and exercise of freedom—which necessarily implies a break with present

society. For many anarchists, insurrection throws off the ideological masks of the old society and

lays the groundwork for the new one.

Although we need to be careful about putting first-century Galilee into a Procrustean bed

shaped by radical theory and practice, peasant revolts were not unknown in that time and place.

Indeed, the Galilee broke out in an armed insurrection after the death of Herod. This rebellion was

most likely economically motivated and not based on abstract ideals such as religious or

nationalist goals. Horsley has described the Galilean peasants of the time as “insurrectionist in

two ways, neither of which was organized or actively revolutionary. First, whenever military

presence was absent, the population was apt to engage in what might be termed ‘peasant anarchy’.

Second, they were resistant to ‘re- conquest’.”95 Freyne, however, focused less on the rebellious

nature of the Galilean peasants and more on the effects of their efforts. In his view, their

insurrections could not have been an unalloyed good.

Rising up was costly: “the potential loss of crops and produce far outweighed the

potential gains one might hope to realize through rebellion.”96 Once again, we do not mean to

suggest that the insurrectionists in the first-century Galilee are equivalent to today’s

insurrectionary anarchists. The point is that the Galilean peasants, like peasants elsewhere, were

often in rebellion, and that their rebellious spirit parallels a similar spirit in anarchism, which has

been “described first and foremost as a visceral revolt.”97

Whether our political practice emphasizes affinity or insurrection, building social

infrastructure or engaging in confrontation, the core problem of radical change remains: “if there

is no uncontaminated point of departure from which power can be criticized or condemned, if

there is no essential limit to the power one is resisting, then surely there can be no resistance

against it.”98 The challenge is to find a point of leverage that can overthrow structures of

domination, without also reviving those same structures—or worse, creating new and more

insidious ones. Restoring dignity and ending domination requires that we erase the alienation

and fetishism that pervades our lives. It requires erasing the separation of economics and

politics, of mental and manual labor, of subject and object, of powerful and powerless, of doing

and done. As Gustav Landauer reminded us: “The State is a social relationship; a certain way of

people relating to one another. It can be destroyed only by creating new social relationships; i.e.,

by people relating to one another differently.”99

Yet emancipation does not come easy, nor does a new social order emerge all at once. As

92 "Insurrectionary Anarchy: Organising for Attack!," Do or Die, no. 10 (2003), http://www.eco-

action.org/dod/no10/anarchy.htm. 93 Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, "Conceptualizing Resistance," Sociological Forum 19, no. 4 (2004);

AK Thompson, Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Geneaology of Dissent (Oakland, CA: AK Press,

2010). 94 "Insurrectionary Anarchy: Organising for Attack!". 95 Rapinchuk, "The Galilee and Jesus in Recent Research," 209. 96 Ibid., 210. 97 Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 13. See also Cindy Milstein,

Anarchism and Its Aspirations (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010). 98 Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, 5. 99 Gustav Landauer, Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader, ed. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), 214.

Holloway has observed: “It is only when grounded in the ubiquity of resistance that revolution

becomes a possibility.”100 Even then, possibility is all that remains. The emancipated life is

always on the horizon.

Conclusion

In the last decade or so, when they thought about religion at all, Badiou, Žižek, and other leftist

social theorists turned their attention to Paul. Paul’s letters were an appropriate target for analysis,

but what was the source of their attraction? Paul stressed a universalism—neither Jew nor Gentile,

neither male nor female—that reminded them of the universal elements of Marxism and

communism. He emphasized the centrality of faith, of spirit, rather than the rigidities of law and

tradition. Challenging the established order, at least in the domain of religion, Paul could be seen

by these theorists as a sort of revolutionary—one who challenged his comrades everywhere to live

more purely, to be better people of the faith. Paul was seen as an exemplar of the political ontology

they had developed, one centered on the Event that produces a radical discontinuity with the old

order. His fervent belief in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus became a prototype for the

authentic revolutionaries who must act in fidelity to the Event.

Yet the Pauline turn is a wrong turn. Paul’s letters did as much to establish orthodoxy as

they did to challenge it. His approach was that of the authoritarian leader who knows what is best

for everyone else. In an age where individualism and freedom are the watchwords, it makes little

sense for people seeking radical change to put their faith in any particular or designated leader,

i.e., to exchange one big Other for another. Equally problematic is the ontology of the Event.

Rooted in conceptions of the cataclysmic Revolution—one in which the proletariat (or the Party)

rises up and seizes state power—the concept of the Event misleads us about the nature of social

and political change. Radical disjunctions or dislocations worthy of the name Event are rare; that

is why we can refer to them by proper nouns—the French Revolution, the October Revolution,

Occupy Wall Street. What this ontology misses are the thousand acts of resistance that happen

more frequently, that are often anonymous, that essentially lay the groundwork for an Event—

should one ever occur.

Rather than focus on cataclysm or rupture, we should be attending to punctuated

equilibrium instead. Micropolitics, not macro; the spirit of revolt, not the Revolution. In this

light, our rejection of the Pauline turn and the ontology of the Event has required us to look

elsewhere for a perspective on the relationship between religion, ideology critique, and radical

politics. As we have suggested, the autonomist and anarchist traditions provide just that

perspective. With an emphasis on struggle and community, the focus of radicalism is not upon

achieving a particular outcome, but upon carrying forward a process. It is not about the thinking

or the saying of the Revolution; it is about the doing of rebellion every day. La lutte continue

… the struggle continues.

In the end, our stance is similar to the conclusion reached by Stuart White: “the practical

role of the anarchist is not to build this unattainable dream, but to push the messy complexity of

society in a more anarchist direction.”101 In our view, the “reign of God” or Jesus movements of

Galilee performed a similar role. Given the limitations of their social and economic standing, as

well as the superior power of Rome and Jerusalem, the movements could not have been expected

100 Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, 175.

101 Stuart White, "Making Anarchism Respectable? The Social Philosophy of Colin Ward," Journal of Political Ideologies 12, no.

1 (2007): 24.

to fundamentally transform their society. The best they could hope for was to resist, slow the

degradation of their traditional way of life, and stake a claim for the idea that another world was

possible. That same faith in the value of small acts of resistance in the here and now is what

sustains many of us today—whether we hold to religious belief or not.

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